BlackBerry Ltd CEO Travelling Far And Wide To Keep Brand Alive

BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) Chief Executive John Chen has been traveling around the globe to meet businesses and government customers offering “High Touch Marketing,” and the journey is not over yet. In the quest of turning around BlackBerry, Chen is all set to visit Indonesia in May to launch Jakarta Z3, according to The Record.

In an interview with The Record, Chen said “I am living hotel to hotel to hotel, it is like packing and unpacking, packing and unpacking,” and added, “This week I have been in so many places I don’t even remember.”

Exhausting schedule for Chen

Chen, who previously worked with Sybase Inc. as its chief executive, is touring to meet 40 BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) customers. His tour will end in New York City for interviews with reporters and analysts. He confessed that although he never had issues in traveling and meeting people, there are some physical limitations.

On a typical day, Chen along with his team visits the city for a breakfast briefing with the chief executives, chief information officers and executive officers to discuss topics such as risk management, mobile data security, identity management and identity security.

Chen stated that Marvell was interested in buying BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB), but the deal did not go through due to reasons he did not reveal. In the context of BlackBerry, BBM, QNX and other parts of the company, Chen said that there will be a day, when map and market will be the guiding force.

Making multiple changes at BlackBerry a challenge

The CEO of the Canadian smartphone company said that the biggest challenge since joining BlackBerry was to make so many changes simultaneously.

“There are so many things that need to be fixed, kind of in parallel, otherwise it takes too long to fix everything sequentially,” he said.

The initiative and the level of changes that Chen has to make reflect the condition of the company in the smartphone market amidst fierce competition. Tracking the condition five years back, one can see that BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) had 20,000 employees all over the world and around 20% of the global smartphone market. Since then the manpower has come down to 7,000 and company’s market share is below 2%.